Books about Claridge from Amazon.com

“What would Emily Post do?” Even today, Americans cite the author of the perennial bestseller Etiquette as a touchstone for proper behavior But who was the woman behind the myth, the authority on good manners who has outlasted all comers? Award-winning author Laura Claridge presents the first authoritative biography of the unforgettable woman who changed the mindset of millions of Americans, an engaging book that sweeps from the Gilded Age to the 1960s.

Born shortly after the Civil War, Emily Post was a daughter of high society, the only child of an ambitious Baltimore architect, Bruce Price, and his wellborn wife. Within a few years of his daughter’s birth, Price moved his family to New York City, where they mingled with the Roosevelts and the Astors as well as with the new crowd in town–J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt clan. Blossoming into one of Manhattan’s most sought-after debutantes, Emily went on to marry Edwin Post, planning to re-create in her own home the happiness she’d observed between her parents. Instead, she would find herself in the middle of a scandalous divorce, its humiliating details splashed across the front pages of New York newspapers for months.

Traumatic though it was, the end of her marriage forced Emily Post to become her own person. She would spend the next fifteen years writing novels and attending high-powered literary events alongside the likes of Mark Twain and Edith Wharton, but in middle age she decided she would try something different.

When it debuted in 1922 with a tiny first print run, Etiquette represented a fifty-year-old woman at her wisest–and a country at its wildest. Claridge addresses the secret of Etiquette’s tremendous success and gives us a panoramic view of the culture from which Etiquette took its shape, as its author meticulously updated her book twice a decade to keep it consistent with America’s constantly changing social landscape.

A tireless advocate for middle-class and immigrant Americans, Emily Post became the emblem of a new kind of manners in which etiquette and ethics were forever entwined. Now, nearly fifty years after her death, we still feel her enormous influence on how we think Best Society should behave.

Praise for Emily Post

“Given the ubiquitousness of her repeatedly revised magnum opus, Etiquette, first published in 1922, we think of Emily Post as an institution rather than a human being. But she was a woman of substance and sensitivity. The first to fully portray this pioneer, Claridge is becoming the sort of biographer readers will follow anywhere, and one hopes she’ll continue in the vein that yielded Norman Rockwell (2001) and now this absorbing study of a keenly perceptive ethicist second only to Eleanor Roosevelt in the immensity of her influence. A child of privilege born in the wake of the Civil War, smart and beautiful Emily Price married a rascal. The pain and humiliation of her divorce from Edwin Post fostered her devotion to writing (she was a successful novelist) and seeded the compassion and advocacy for women that shaped her highly moral approach to etiquette. Claridge chronicles Post’s remarkable ability to discern the needs of a Claridge chronicles Post’s remarkable ability to discern the needs of a burgeoning American public transformed by immigration, industrialization, war, and women’s and civil rights, and hungry for guidance in social and familial situations. A best-selling writer and hugely popular radio personality, Post equated etiquette with character and ensured a ‘democratization of manners.’ Claridge greatly deepens our appreciation for Post’s achievements and brings forward the impressive woman behind the do’s and don’ts.” ---Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“It was the genius of Emily Post to show us that manners are the small coin of morality….Emily Post became perhaps the most important and certainly the most influential moralist of the 20th century. It is Laura Claridge’s genius to explain the surprising and improbable background and equally amazing personality of Emily Post.” — P.J. O’Rourke, author of Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People

“What she [Claridge] has given us is not only a canny and insightful read, but when she calls her Emily ‘a domestic anthropologist,’ you know she’s right. Brava!”–Nancy Milford, author of Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Laura Claridge has given us so much more than a mere biography of this august arbiter of good manners; [She] has flung open the doors of an entire society — she has shown us in enchanting, mesmerizing detail how the modern city of New York was built and made.” -- Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life

“… a biography as rich and engaging as a portrait by John Singer Sargent.” — Daniel Mark Epstein, author of The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage

“Laura Claridge’s masterful Emily Post tells the story of a lively heroine, raised in a Gilded Age New York of silk-stockings and debutante balls, who wrote one of the enduring bestsellers of the 20th century…. Laura Claridge’s vivid, graceful biography of Emily Post is an essential contribution to American social history.”  ——Eric Homberger, author of Mrs. Astor’s New York

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Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Domestic Art: Curated Interiors captures a mind-set, piques a curiosity to look at things anew, appreciate oddities and revel in uniqueness and personal work. It s a loopy but sublime drawing-room comedy with ghosts of dandies and soulful poets and style aesthetes ... all lounging, sipping and chattering away in 18th-century châteaux inserted into downtown lofts, whitewashed shotgun houses filled with Twomblys and Rauschenbergs, and dark-as-a-hedgehog tiny Tudors.

The selected houses in this book were pulled from the pages of PaperCity, from the years 2000 to 2008. Roughly a decade of design alchemy and clinking highballs. The editors of this book foraged for both the musty and gutsy and the soaring and sensual, from a 500-square-foot bedsit to a mid-century organic architectural wonder thirty seven glorious projects, from follies to disciplined mansions, from Dominique and John de Menil s International-style house with its interior by the great couturier Charles James to artist Christian Eckart s abandoned 1940s warehouses polished to gleaming architectural wonder. Marvel at a compound of rescued, early-1900s clapboards, and an 1880s German-immigrant cottage. We ve included a 50s masterwork by the great organic architect Bruce Goff, and an industrial space that crackles with own surreal designs, while a chalet-style 1913 bungalow manifests the best bits and pieces of the past. A turn-of-the-century seaside gingerbread is a study in anthropology peppered with good art; an antiquarian aims his cerebral arrows at Louis this and Louis that, then electrifies it all with saturated color; and an 18th-century château and an old-world hunting lodge is installed in a downtown loft space. Meanwhile, a stylish gent sips scotch neat in his Scotch Room, watched over by two mounted deer, a pheasant and a wildebeest. Shouldn t everyone have a wildebeest ... and a Scotch Room?

Call it what you will: lavish, loopy, eccentric assemblages, moody modernism. All in all, quite a look at a genre of design we call, simply, inspired..
Price: $34.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Capital and showcase of the Roman Empire and the center of Christian Europe, the city of Rome is the largest archaeological site in the world. Here, Amanda Claridge presents an indispensable guide to all significant monuments in Rome dating from 800 BC to 600 AD. Included are such breathtaking structures as the Capitoline Hill, the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, the Mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian, the Circus Maximus, and the Catacombs. Divided into twelve main archaeological areas in central Rome, and four in Greater Rome, this accessible guide provides a detailed overview of the sites, as well as historical reference tables listing archaeological periods, emperors, and principal surviving buildings. The introduction offers an assessment of Roman achievement along with its status as the capital of the Roman Empire, and explains Rome's survival as the world's most complex archaeological site..
Price: $15.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In today's world of specialization, people are attempting to protect the Earth's fragile state by swapping limousines for hybrids and pesticide-laced foods for organic produce. At other times, environmental awareness is translated into public relations gimmicks or trendy commodities. Moreover, simplistic policies, like single-species protection or planting ten trees for every tree cut down, are touted as bureaucratic or industrial panaceas.

Because today's decisions are tomorrow's consequences, every small effort makes a difference, but a broader understanding of our environmental problems is necessary to the development of sustainable ecosystem policies. In Trees, Truffles, and Beasts, Chris Maser, Andrew W. Claridge, and James M. Trappe make a compelling case that we must first understand the complexity and interdependency of species and habitats from the microscopic level to the gigantic. Comparing forests in the Pacific Northwestern United States and Southeastern mainland of Australia, the authors show how easily observable species--trees and mammals--are part of a complicated infrastructure that includes fungi, lichens, and organisms invisible to the naked eye, such as microbes.

Eminently readable, this important book shows that forests are far more complicated than most of us might think, which means simplistic policies will not save them. Understanding the biophysical intricacies of our life-support systems just might..
Price: $26.42 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book describes the most important high-resolution NMR techniques that find use in the structure elucidation of organic molecules and the investigation of their behavior in solution.

The techniques are presented and explained using pictorial formats wherever possible, limiting the number of mathematical descriptions. The emphasis is on the more recently developed methods of solution-state NMR spectroscopy with a considerable amount of information on implementation and on the setting of critical parameters for anyone wishing to exploit these methods.

* presents a large number of examples to demonstrate the utility of the methods covered

* serves the needs of students and professionals in every chemistry laboratory

* describes the most important methods available, with guidance on execution of experiments.
Price: $52.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Norman Rockwell’s hundreds of memorable covers for The Saturday Evening Post made him a twentieth-century American icon. However, because of the very popularity of his idealized depictions of middle-class life, his more serious paintings have been largely ignored, and he has often been deemed a mere illustrator, not a “real” artist.

In this, the first comprehensive biography of America’s most popular artist, Laura Claridge breaks new ground with her appreciative but clear-eyed view of Rockwell’s work—and his life. Based upon previously unpublished family archives and hundreds of interviews, this account reveals for the first time the deep disparity between the artist’s public image and his private life..
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This up-to-date account of key areas in modern organic spectroscopy describes the four major instrumental methods used routinely by organic chemists: ultra-violet/visible, infra-red, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and mass spectroscopy. It provides a concise introduction to the physical background of each, describing how molecules interact with electromagnetic radiation or how they fragment when excited sufficiently, and how this information may be applied to the determination of chemical structures. It also includes simple descriptions of instrumentation and emphasizes modern methodology throughout, such as the Fourier-transform approach to data analysis. Each chapter concludes with problems to test readers' understanding of organic spectroscopy..
Price: $20.02 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This ground-breaking work is a unique collaboration between an Oxford psychologist and two literary critics. It explores the lives and works of ten authors, among them Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who embody both serious mental illness and great originality of thought. Drawing upon personal diaries, historical archives, clinical records and literary productions, the book examines modes of thinking, such as divergent thought, over-inclusiveness, and autism, which psychosis and creativity might have in common.

Using genetics, experimental abnormal and clinical psychology, personality research, descriptive psychiatry, and literary analysis, Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins present the revolutionary idea that normality and psychosis are continuous with each other. Healthy varieties and styles of thought and perception substantially overlap with the inclination to psychotic breakdown, and indeed might at times be identical.

Psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, therapists, and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between madness and creativity from this book..
Price: $6.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]